The moment Lemarion appeared, the world grew impossibly still.
Not with silence—but with pressure. Like the air itself recognized a greater presence and held its breath.
Cael stood unmoving, facing the cloaked figure. Time stretched like wax in a flame, slowing the beat of the world. Behind him, Elen regained her footing, gripping her staff so tightly her knuckles turned white.
"He's not supposed to be here," she said. "The Spindle Guardians only watch... they don't interfere."
Cael's gaze narrowed. "Then why is he standing on our road?"
Lemarion didn't move. The mask he wore—a smooth ivory surface adorned with seven seared symbols—tilted slightly. Each eye on that mask burned with crimson light, their centers spinning like coals caught in a divine forge.
"You've walked far, Threadless One," the voice said again. It was deep, but fractured—like five voices speaking in unison from different ages. "Too far."
Cael clenched his fist. For the first time, the world beneath him felt foreign. Alien.
His body was here, but it was like wearing someone else's skin. The wind didn't carry his scent. The ground didn't echo his steps. He was becoming a ghost in a realm that remembered everything but him.
"I was born far from your dream," Cael replied. "Let me finish walking through it."
Lemarion extended a hand. In his palm shimmered a small obsidian shard—so black it seemed to drink in light.
A Spindle Mark.
Cael had read of them in old tower scrolls—tokens created to sever souls from their origin threads. Tools used only in war, long before the Loom Accord forbade such acts.
"You are not supposed to exist," Lemarion said, beginning to walk toward him across the crystalline bridge. "And yet... here you are. Not bound by memory. Not claimed by death. A paradox. And we—keepers of the Spindle—must weave paradoxes into silence."
The bridge trembled with each step the Archflare took.
Elen stepped forward. "He carries the Thread of Flame and Sleep. The Dreamtomb calls him. That overrides—"
"I do not answer to calling," Lemarion said, cutting her off with a voice like falling hammers. "Only to balance."
Cael's heartbeat slowed. He turned his gaze inward.
Why did I think I could just walk through this world?
He remembered the inn in Thornewheat. The boy who gave him bread. The dying flamekeeper woman in Aroden Hollow who whispered, "You look like a prayer I once made."
All those people. Had he stolen something from them?
Or was he giving something back—just by being here?
Elen grabbed his hand suddenly.
"You don't have to fight," she whispered. "There are other paths. If we step off the bridge, we can reach the Threadborne Archive through the Fadewind Caverns."
"No," Cael said. "If I run now... I'll never find what I am."
A pause.
"Then we stand together."
Lemarion stopped just twenty paces away. The light around him dimmed, like the world didn't dare compete with his radiance.
"Very well," the Archflare said.
And in an instant—fire exploded across the crystal path.
Searing arcs of red flame, shaped like tongues of a sleeping god, curled around Cael and Elen. The bridge trembled as molten glyphs erupted beneath their feet, twisting and reshaping the structure into a burning arena suspended above the abyss.
Cael stepped forward.
No armor. No weapon. Just him, a breath away from vanishing.
But the fire didn't touch him.
Instead, it flowed into him.
His veins lit like inked silver. His eyes shimmered gold.
Because the Dreamtomb wasn't calling him.
It was remembering him.